Engagement Chronicle: Work as Divorce American Style

Shocking disengagement. According to Eva Jenkins, the increasing number of American workers who are divorced from their jobs and completely disengaged from their work is shocking. More than that, it’s costing businesses a fortune in lost productivity and revenue.

Bad managers/Poor training. The report puts the blame on human resource managers stating that disengaged workers aren’t born that way but are created by ineffective, badly trained managers.

22 million. This resonates with the Gallup Management Journal’s semi-annual Employee Engagement Index reports that 54% of employees are not engaged, and 17% are actively disengaged at work and only 29% are actively engaged. Disengagement can be seen in employee absence, illness, and a variety of other big and small problems that occur when people are unhappy at work. This translates to 22 million actively disengaged workers in the United States.

According to Jenkins,

This is an urgent problem and businesses that don’t address their own role in the problem are doomed. Companies don’t realize how important it is to give their managers the tools and training they need to do their jobs, too.

Get Engaged

What do you believe are the sources of disengagement in your workplace?

What role does blame play in disengagement?

What are your responses to disengagement for yourself, the people you lead, and the organization?

Comments

Good post. Thanks for highlighting the extent and urgency of the problem. This is also a significant opportunity. We’ve learned how to leverage every other kind of business resource, yet human potential is vastly underutilized and this is an invitation for both employees and employers to sit up and take notice!

People feel disengaged because they don’t feel involved at a personal level. Jobs have come to mean security, money and status for most of us. We spend more than half of the waking hours in a typical day doing something on, or related to, our jobs. If we don’t feel personally engaged, that time is, in a sense, a colossal waste for the individual, and ultimately the corporation and society. So how can we feel involved again? How can we find energy, passion and meaning in our jobs? I take a potshot at answering that with my workshops on ‘Aligning work with Purpose’.